The Bolyai Institute of the University of Szeged is pleased to announce that

on the proposal of the editorial board of the journal Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum (Szeged)

the Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal for the year 2020 has been awarded to

Franciszek Hugon Szafraniec

Professor Emeritus (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland)

The Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal was founded in 1999 by Erzsébet Szőkefalvi-Nagy in memory of her father Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy, who served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum from 1946 to 1981. The Medal is awarded annually by the Bolyai Institute to honour a distinguished mathematician who has published significant results in the journal. Franciszek Hugon Szafraniec has achieved outstanding results in the fields of Functional Analysis and Operator Theory and published four high- impact articles in the journal Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum.

Professor Szafraniec's research in Mathematics covers a wide range of topics. His initial adventure with Nonlinear Analysis culminated in 1968 when he received his PhD degree from the Jagiellonian University. Then he suddenly turned to Operator Theory catching, in the right moment, the most interesting part of it - Dilation Theory. He got immediately fascinated by Sz.-Nagy’s Appendix (1955), which has inspired his research to date. Professor Szafraniec's rare ability of finding associations between seemingly diverse topics allowed him to consider Sz.-Nagy's general dilation theorem as the source of many ideas leading even beyond Operator Theory itself. His observation that in the proof of the aforesaid dilation theorem the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) tool is encoded raised his interest in RKHS significantly and led him to profound applications in e.g. Complex Variables, Harmonic Analysis and Quantum Theory. Professor Szafraniec published four research papers in Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum,

two of them related to Dilation Theory, one of them having received over 60 citations.

Due to the current pandemic the official award ceremony

of the Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal will be held at a later date.